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A Survivor of Rwanda's Horrors
Writes Hope Into Law
By Nora Boustany
January 25, 2006 – (Washington Post) She was born a Rwandan
refugee in Uganda, where her parents herded cattle. A bright and determined
student, she went to class under a tree using a borrowed identity,
was smuggled across borders to continue her schooling, graduated from
Uganda's Makerere University and studied law on a scholarship in Australia.
But inevitably, she returned to Rwanda to work. She was there in 1994
when the genocide broke out. An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered
in 100 days -- mostly members of the Tutsi tribe -- including her
father, her first husband and seven of her eight brothers and sisters.
Her mother died while in hiding.
Now 42, Justine Mbabazi has become one of the new female leaders in
her homeland: a lawyer who drafted Rwanda's first legislation against
gender-based violence, country director of the American Bar Association,
and former executive director of a legal network that brought the
rights of women to the forefront of national politics and played a
critical role in the debate over a new constitution.
"My story is just a tiny dot compared to what others suffered
in Rwanda," said Mbabazi, who just finished attending a colloquium
in Boston and Washington with 25 other women who have survived bullets,
ethnic cleansing, political isolation and social discrimination in
such countries as Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Colombia, Bosnia, Somalia
and Kyrgyzstan.
The event was organized by the Initiative for Inclusive Security,
chaired by Swanee Hunt , a former U.S. ambassador to Austria. The
women met with officials from U.S. government agencies, the United
Nations, world financial institutions, and relief and security organizations.
"The issues I am dealing with are big," Mbabazi said. "Justice
and reconciliation. I feel I have to push until there is a legal framework
to prevent it from happening again. I know I am the voice of a big
congregation of women, not only in Rwanda. All over the world there
are women who are ashamed and frustrated that rape is still being
used as a weapon of hate and revenge."
Mbabazi's odyssey has been extraordinary by any measure.
When she was 11, she asked her father what Rwanda looked like. Tearfully,
he answered, "It looks like you." Soon after that, she left
her family and safe haven in Uganda and returned to Rwanda to get
a better education. She was smuggled across Tanzania by traders, went
to live with an aunt and obtained Hutu documents to attend school.
"To survive I had to change identities, and I felt growing up
that it was unjust," she said.
As a driven young adult, Mbabazi kept moving, though she also married
and began raising a family. She joined Norwegian relief organizations
and lived in Norway, but her work took her to Burundi, Ethiopia and
back to Rwanda.
After a crisis in Uganda put pressure on Rwandan refugees, her family
decided to return home in 1979. Mbabazi visited them from time to
time. In 1990, seven months pregnant, she was briefly imprisoned as
a suspected Tutsi spy.
Four years later, while she was working in the Rwandan town of Kigali,
the genocide erupted. With thousands of fellow Tutsis being slaughtered,
she tried to bribe her way into the Hotel de Mille Collines -- the
safe haven depicted in the film "Hotel Rwanda" -- but was
unable to reach it. To escape from Hutu security men, she hid with
her children in a cave.
"Nights gave me a bit of relief. I was scared to see the sun
rise merely because I was afraid of being killed," she wrote
in a slim memoir titled "A Journey to Remember."
In the aftermath of the bloodbath, she took several orphans under
her wing and took them out begging for food.
"What let me think there was hope was to see women pick up children
from garbage cans and roundabouts, calling them their own, though
they themselves were traumatized and hungry," Mbabazi said.
"I had found the country that looked like me," she said.
"Without a husband, I was raising an angry brood of children
who came home with horror stories from school every day."
In 1997, she left for Canada and applied for asylum to lead a more
tranquil life. She worked as an immigration officer, helping displaced
Africans, and studied for a master's degree in gender studies.
"I also had time to grieve," she said. "I was safe
and I could cry. In Rwanda, crying was meaningless. . . . There were
women who were raped and who could not stand up. They were dying inside
their own bodies."
Later, she obtained a master's and a doctorate in law from American
University's Washington College of Law, graduating in 2004. She began
working as a consultant for Rwanda's new legislators -- half of whom
are women -- and decided to return to Kigali.
Despite the cruel tragedy that befell her family, Mbabazi's buoyant
personality kept her going. Through intelligence, courage, hard work
and the kindness of strangers, a survivor of Rwanda's genocide is
now shaping the future of her country.
"We have to prepare for the next generation now because there
is a political will," she said. "Sharing the Rwandan experience
is providing hope for others."
From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/24/AR2006012401724_pf.html
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